by Albert Alla
I remained there for hours, for soon it was dark, and I couldn’t discern one cloud from another. My body was damp with dew and stiff with cold, but that was incidental. The field looked different at night, and so did the memorial. Dimly lit, its tip darker than the trees around it, it had a foreboding beauty. It stood exactly where the Kemp Annexe had stood. There was a ramp approaching it from the field and another from the school. I took the one from the field. Lights low on the walls lit the path like a plane’s aisle. The flower beds sitting on the parapets were prettier for the half-light. I could make out handprints moulded into the wall, and small plaques beneath them. I bent down to inspect the one right by my foot: ‘I learned that nothing was for granted.’ And the student’s name: Harry Williams. The one student I’d disliked, for his petulant mouth, his spanky hair, and the way he’d always tried harder than he should. And in an instant, that image disappeared, replaced by one of a boy (a man now, I guessed) who had never fitted in, and who, when he’d lost people who hadn’t cared about him, had still lost it all. I placed my hand over his handprint – his fingers were surprisingly long – and went inside the memorial.
Leona had described it as like being inside a stomach made of glass. At night, with the few lights making the glass walls a cavernous boundary, I understood her. The walls curved high towards the start of the spire, meeting it at least four times my height from the ground, so that the reflected light barely brushed the ceiling. Instead the spare lighting focused on a low wall, made of a damp yellow stone and angled like a lectern, which formed most of a circle and occupied the centre of the monument. I followed its inside, my fingers running over the stone: Graham Johnson, Tom Davies, Laura Clarkson, Jayvanti Patel, Jeffrey Baker, Satish Choudary, Edward Moss, Paul Cumnor, Grace Li, Anna Walker. They each had a simple gold-plated plaque with their name in a bare font, and underneath each plaque, I could feel it with my fingers, were a few handwritten words engraved into the stone. ‘No one will make us laugh like you’ was written under Anna’s name, and ‘The cats always sleep on your bed’ underneath Laura’s. The writing under Jeffrey’s name was Amanda’s. It said, ‘We think of you every day’. Ironic, I thought: Leona never thought of her brother. But there was beauty in her way too, I corrected myself, and I saw it clearly for the first time: her life had never been anchored by grief, and that was perhaps the freest of lives.
There was no plaque with Eric’s name on the wall. Searching for one around the monument, I came across another yellow-stoned wall near the exit. It had the names of all those who’d come to our help. Batterthew, Elizabeth Batterthew, that was the name of the kind paramedic who’d taken me to hospital. I didn’t know the other names, but I remembered the uniforms busying themselves around us in the room, and outside, in the sharp light. And, centred, alone, on the far edge of the wall, under its own heading – Wounded – a plaque with my name. If I had to have one, I preferred it where it was, isolated.
The space, cosy where I stood, but soaring at its centre, invited me to follow its contours. Walking along the glass wall, I almost missed it. It looked like dirt smeared on the ground, but there it was, on a small slab, like a saint’s tomb in a cathedral: Eric Knight. Nothing but those two words. I was glad to see them, and I remembered the groundsman: three years of consultations. If anything had needed consultation, it must have been that name, which should have stood on the round wall, but which some would have never wanted in the memorial at all. I kneeled next to it and prayed, to no god in particular, but to the enclosed space, to the memory of those I’d let die, to Eric and his mother, and most of all, to a kindness that was spreading from my solar plexus like it would encompass all.
Then I went to the room’s centre, and I sat on the yellow-stoned bench that lay in between the circle of plaques. The stone was porous yet smooth. From that point in the memorial, every line seemed to funnel my gaze up towards the spire, and further towards a small window that crowned the spire. Through it, I could see a corner of the sky: two ex-centred stars in a black disk. I closed my eyes and I let my thoughts glide down to the stone dais and my crossed legs, like a Buddhist monk in between chants. I saw myself; with distance, it all made sense. I was going to die because I deserved to, because Leona needed me to.
It was when my thoughts quietened that I realised that I was hungry. It was half past nine, and I hadn’t had any food all day. But I wanted to flow with the beauty around me. I called Leona. She answered on the first ring, her voice as hazy as mine.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘I’m in bed,’ she said, murmuring, and I could almost touch her detached kindness. She sounded like she’d spent the day agitated too. Immediately, I felt like anything I could say would be right:
‘Sleeping?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know yet. I’m just in bed. Maybe I’ll fall asleep, maybe I’ll stay like I am.’
I don’t know why, she never said so, but I knew she was at her parents’, in her green flannel pyjamas, the same duvet cover she’d had since she was eight, a uniform red with three embroidered yellow flowers, covering her up to her midriff, her left hand resting on the duvet right above her hip-bone.
‘Tell me about your day,’ I said.
‘I went for a long walk along the Thames and then I made jam,’ she said. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘The walk, the jam, everything. I want to hear you speak.’
‘Well, you know Farmoor Reservoir’ – she started, and I listened to her voice narrate her day, and I delighted with her when she told me of the trees overrunning the path, when she described the sweetness of her pears. We spoke until I ran out of credit. She called me back but it was half past ten and she needed to sleep.
Happy, I meditated. Had I years rather than five days left, I would have spent my life striving for the state I was in now. I felt it deep inside: it was time to let go of my hysteria, to see death as an opportunity. My thoughts felt free. They brushed and circled and caressed the Leona I’d known. The flow I’d noticed on our first date. The ease with which she’d moved, with which she’d spoken. Yes, our first few careless days had been something special. And then Jeffrey’s ghost came in between us, for I needed to lay him to rest and she needed to keep him at bay.
I remembered a spot I’d hiked to alone in the Alps, the one summer I’d spent in the mountains, when I was trying to spend a day away from Denret. A farmer’s dam in a secluded valley: above it, two rugged slopes meeting in a narrow stream. Below it, a rapid drop to a cosy plateau caught in between the peaks, dotted with green pastures and yellowing cornfields. On a whim, I’d veered off the main path, following a goat’s trail instead, and I’d reached a crest. From my vantage point, I could see the vastness of the mountains in the distance, and right by my feet, this little valley folded on itself, with its dark pool carved into the rock, the water so still that I could see its high walls reflected on the surface. I walked to the top of a small knoll that formed one of the pool’s walls, and I stared down at it: it was late in the summer, and the water was so low, the walls so slick, that a man falling in would have drowned while trying to climb out. From the distance of memory, I flew above my spot and thought of Leona: such wild beauty in the scene, from the jagged rocks forming a spine on the mountain ridge, the high grass darkening the gully, the haze softening the yellows and greens of the plateau, to the waterhole itself, deep, simple and threatening. The view was different from within the dam – from there, all I could see was the brown clay smudging the dark walls, and above, between sky and rock, the top of the knoll and the grass on the crest. From that view, I was a man drowning. And there I’d been, taking a walk in this little valley with Leona, guiding us to the waterhole, while she preferred the view from the crest, nudging her closer despite her resistance, and then at the edge of the hole, when she looked at me with a compassionate smile, I’d pushed her in.
My thoughts lined themselves around the scene: I’d pushed Leona into the darkest part of herself, some sort of ang
ry grief she’d repressed, when she’d lived in a world as beautiful as that valley. And I pictured her standing in her green summer dress, her skin lightly tanned, a rebellious strand of her hair slowly falling towards her other cheek, while inside, she ignored her swirls of anger and resolutely clung on to everything that was beautiful within. I felt a deep, awed love towards the girl who’d listened to her father three weeks after her brother’s death and chose everything that was noble within, to the girl who’d fought all her life to stay that way and who’d kept on trying when she’d realised who I was, when I had, selfish and clumsy, repeatedly mentioned her brother.
And suddenly, jarring me out of my amazement, I understood that I was leaving her drowning in a waterhole. I’d be floating under Donnington Bridge and the police would be knocking on her door. I couldn’t have her in chains, locked up when she was innocent at heart. I opened my eyes and looked at the memorial around me.
I needed to move. There was so much to do. Five days to help Leona. Five days to parse through the surge of feelings throbbing through my veins. Five days to capture beauty. I was outside, striding by the archway to nowhere, looking through my pocket for my bike key, pacing around the main building. I’d been a good enough sketcher when I was twelve, but after my years in the wilderness, I could feel it with my spaceships, my lines were good but five days weren’t enough to get them right. I’d have needed five years. In five days, all I could do was write my story, starting where I’d left off, and hope that amongst stacks and piles, in the four months I’d put down on paper, I’d capture at least one moment in all its beauty. One would do: a fraction of a sky, the edge of a cloud, splitting glare and shadow, and my life would be well spent. A simple anecdote, the way Leona scratched her temples when she thought – to watch her fingers tap-dance across her brow one more time!
I pulled my bike off the rack and started riding on the unlit roads, down the hill towards the main road, cool air playing through my hair, the smooth asphalt smoother still at night. I felt ecstatic, full of purpose. The feeling had to be contagious – I had to share it with my parents, with my brother. If only he felt the way I did, he wouldn’t need drugs and he’d stop his silent war with my mother. Five days; I made it into a refrain, and I sung all the way home.
***
Fuck. Three hours until Leona arrives. She’ll have dinner pre-made, safely locked up in a bag full of Tupperwares. A travelling pharmacist travelling for me and only for me. She told me to throw away the herbs she bought when she was here last Saturday. She had a new dish in mind – she wanted to use basil instead, and there was some in her garden at home. And now, I have three hours to write what happened in the last five days. Three manic hours until we celebrate nos quatre mois, until this spirit rallies for one last hurray, until this grace comes across the simplest of fears. Here it comes, the first shot of adrenaline, and my fingers are shaking.
Four days ago, I woke up full of a thinning purpose. Before my feet touched the floor, I’d counted it: four days, and a pang of fear started in my heart’s lowest chamber, tightened the muscles across my shoulders. Four days. But I had a purpose – that much was clear. When I asked myself what it was, all I could come up with was a single, meaningless word: beauty. Hissing, I forced my mind back into the memorial, to the stone dais under the spire, in between the plaques, until I felt some of the previous day’s calm. Then I started my computer and opened a new document.
After I’d spent twelve hours writing, after I felt my gut drop for tiredness, after I thought I’d collapse through my green exercise ball, that I’d waver and roll with it until I slammed through the ground, I stood up, shook the stiffness out of my muscles, and went to my mother’s. I had no food left in my fridge. My vision, so long narrowed to a white screen, broadened on the walk over. When I saw her sitting at the dining table, her laptop on the one side, a pile of papers on the other, her careful eyes shifting from one to the other, her hands fingering the paper softly, I felt a pang of regret. This is what she’d done every night throughout my childhood, what had earned her the respect of her world, and there she was again, years later, my mother doing what she was best at. I was seeing it for one last time.
‘Nate,’ she said, standing up, forgetting her all-important work. ‘You haven’t been answering your phone.’
‘I guess I haven’t.’
‘Are you hungry?’ she said, already walking towards the kitchen.
‘I haven’t eaten for two days.’
She came close, grabbed my wrists and studied me. And then, with a mother’s certainty, she hugged me like she’d hugged me when I was little and tearful. In her clasp, I recalled the smell of my tears on her woollen jumpers, the weight of her long arms enclosing me when I’d fallen off my bicycle. When she made as if to let go, I hugged her tighter in turn, snugly, consoling her for what was to come. We stayed in each other’s arms for a whole minute. There was everything in that hug: my apologies, hers, my goodbyes. Everything but an outright explanation – but I couldn’t tell her what she’d want to know without compromising Leona.
‘Your father’s out of town,’ she said when I finally released her. ‘It’s just the two of us then.’ She opened the fridge. ‘What do you feel like?’
I smiled a son’s smile and kept on playing my part throughout the evening. It was my parting gift. When she prodded me, I offered no resistance and went along with her wishes at the merest of hints. I told her everything she wanted to hear – my thoughts on life after my course, a research project on the ethics of internet subscription plans, how nice Leona was – and none of it felt like a lie. I was proud of the subtle change that came over her. It was in the way she spoke that I noticed it best: her voice’s timbre became thoughtful and her ideas grew more and more open to discussion. For one precious evening, I was seeing my mother as she’d always wanted me to see her: a determined mother and a close friend. A woman who would do all to protect me, who wanted me to call her at four in the morning because I needed to cry. A mother who felt like she was getting closer to her son. Before I left, I hugged her again. It was different this time: my arms found her aged – it was a precious feeling, to see my mother in full and to find her a diminished woman. I rocked her from side to side, happy to know her so. She sobbed in my arms.
On my walk back, I tried to call Leona but I had no credit left. Funny, I thought, that something as insignificant as money could get in the way of a man’s last wish. Funny that so much was made of a man’s last wish, when it was the one wish in a man’s life that had the least bearing upon the rest of his life. The young man with long hair walking towards me would lend me his phone if I explained my story. But if, a week earlier, I’d told him that my girlfriend and I were going through a rocky patch, he’d have told me that he had no credit left. And yet, a week ago, I could have still saved myself from this fate.
Just as I opened the Cowley flat’s door, I knew what I was going to do for Leona. The plan came to me unannounced, fully formed, flawless. It was so easy: look at the labels on the medicine bottles and place an express order for the same ones on the internet. It took less than an hour, and the two same drugs I’d found in my cake tin were flying across the world to meet me. A green and a pink gate, and I’d be floating guiltless under Donnington Bridge, a satisfied smile marring my death rictus, and she’d be crying in her mother’s arms, safe from those who ask too many questions.
Emboldened by the time I’d spent with my mother, I caught a train to London the next day and dropped in on my brother. I walked up his street with a decided step, by its blackened red-brick houses, its small front yards, its withering trees. When I rang the bell, I expected no response – I’d walk in, he’d be stoned in his living room, and we’d talk like we’d never talked before. But there was no music escaping the front porch, and I heard footsteps coming to the door. James opened the door and looked at me with bloodshot eyes.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. He poked his head out to look at the street.
; ‘What, are you expecting someone else?’
He stood straight:
‘What are you doing here?’
I smiled awkwardly.
‘Can I come in?’
‘Sure,’ he sighed.
I followed him inside, past the peeling green wallpaper. I didn’t know what was missing, but the corridor felt barer this time. He went into the living room. The sofa’s cushions were still scattered all over the floor. There was a man I didn’t know hunched with his back to the wall. He was so thin that veins bulged blue and green all over his exposed skin, thick on his temples, forming a web over his bald skull. He looked at me suspiciously.
‘Hi, I’m James’ brother,’ I said.
He looked away, suddenly uninterested, and I sat on the cushion next to my brother.
‘What are you doing here?’ James asked.
I took a deep breath:
‘I was hoping to spend a little time with you.’
‘Have you broken up with Leona?’
‘No, no, why are you saying this?’
He sneered: ‘Why didn’t she come with you then?’
I didn’t know what to answer. I shouldn’t have come like this, without letting him know first.
‘What time is it?’ the other man in the room said.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ James shouted at the wall, and then turned angrily towards me: ‘What?’
I looked at his friend.
‘Can I speak to you alone?’ I asked.
‘Fuck, fucking hell!’ James shouted.
‘Please, James. Please.’
‘Alright.’ He stood up and sniggered. ‘Here will do right,’ he said in the corridor. There was no point in arguing, in pushing for more privacy. ‘What do you want?’ he said.
‘Well,’ I started, looking at him, thinking that if I didn’t do it now, it would never happen. ‘I wanted to say that you’re very important to me.’